Angela Ahrendts

The CEO of Burberry will soon be leaving for the position of Retail Chief at Apple, but not before taking the luxury brand digital. Under Ahrendts' leadership, Burberry has built some incredibly tech-savvy retail stores where people can use their smartphones to learn more about a product.

On the brand side, Ahrendts, an American, turned Burberry from a label previously associated with stodgy outerwear to the biggest high-fashion brand in the U.K., worth an estimated $10.4 billion.

Akerson is credited with taking the Cadillac from being "Seinfeld's dad's car" to a luxury car maker on par with the likes of Audi and BMW.

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Jeff Bezos

Reuters

CEO, Amazon

Amazon is growing at breakneck speed. The e-commerce giant, which was once a two-dimensional book selling website, now sells nearly everything under the sun. And that may soon include cell phones.

Word has gotten out that Amazon has been working with HTC on a series of smartphones, one of which is in "an advanced stage of development," a source tells the Financial Times. It's a different — and bigger — beast from making and selling Kindles, as now Amazon will have the support of service carriers behind them.

The company is also incredibly hip. They reportedly partnered with Google to help make Google Glass look more stylish, and Blumenthal became an advocate for hiring more millennials in an Inc. article.

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Warren Buffett

Levo League

CEO, Berkshire Hathaway

The masterful investor and world's fourth richest man led Berkshire Hathaway in a number of acquisitions this year. The conglomerate holdings company buddied up with investment firm 3G Capital to buy ketchup maker Heinz for $28 billion, and snagged Nevada's electric and gas company NV Energy for $5.6 billion.

In May, Buffett wrote a provocative article in Fortune on how America has made a terrible mistake in under-utilizing the talents of women, leading the way for other companies to also re-evaluate the way they hire and promote women.

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Kat Cole

Cinnabon, which was once seen as just a food kiosk in malls, is now becoming a household brand name thanks to Cole.

The former Hooters waitress worked her way up to become president of Cinnabon before the age of 35, and is credited with taking its indulgent creations to grocery store shelves and fast food chains like Taco Bell. Licensing now accounts for more than half the chain's revenue, and this year global sales will reach $1 billion.

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Dick Costolo

AP

CEO, Twitter

It was a big year for social networking company Twitter, which successfully completed its IPO earlier this month. The IPO was priced at $26 a share, but the opening trade was almost double that, at $45.10, and share prices closed at $44.90 — a huge relief for both investors and the company, considering how badly Facebook's IPO went.

Costolo, a former stand-up comedian who took the helm of Twitter in October 2010, has noted the challenges of leading a company he didn't found, yet still managed to grow revenues from $28 million in 2010 to $254 million in just the first half of 2013.

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Reed Hastings

Photo by Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images

CEO, Netflix

Not long ago, Wall Street couldn't stop hammering Hastings as a failed business leader when he split Netflix into two companies — an online streaming service and a separate DVD-by-mail business. He recovered from the debacle, and now Netflix has become a bona fide threat to the cable model. It's got more subscribers than HBO, its stock surged 260% this year, and it picked up 14 Emmy nominations.

Netflix bet big on original programming this year, and saw runaway success with "House of Cards" and "Orange Is the New Black." It also recently announced four Marvel TV original series.

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Marillyn Hewson

Hewson held 19 other titles at Lockheed Martin before becoming the first female CEO of the world's largest defense contractor in January. Now, in the face of deep government budget cuts, she's making tough decisions to protect its future.

In October, Lockheed Martin announced it would join forces with Boeing in a bid to build a fleet of 80 to 100 new bombers for the Air Force.

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Bob Iger

Jae C. Hong / AP

CEO, Disney

This time last year Disney acquired Lucasfilm for just over $4 billion, giving the House of Mouse rights to the cult-like Star Wars empire and the revenue that goes with it. Iger has already seen to it that a new Star Wars movie be released in December 2015, along with a new array of Star Wars toys, games, and other merchandise.

Of course, Iger hasn't forgotten about his last big acquisition either; a Marvel-themed attraction will be popping up in Hong Kong in the near future, and four new Marvel superhero shows will be made exclusively for Netflix.

Hubert Joly

While many have predicted the tumultuous decline of Best Buy, Joly has employed some brilliant strategies through his "Renew Blue" initiative to leverage what used to be seen as weaknesses, up their game with the competition, and re-energize the company.

He is closing some of the oversized and underutilized stores and opting for smaller physical spaces while digging further into digital spaces. That includes shipping purchases directly from some 1,000 stores to customers who buy online.

The effort has been paying off, with company shares up 10% in the third quarter.

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Jørgen Vig Knudstorp

Lego Group nearly went bankrupt in 2003 as video games and other toys booted the Danish company from every kid's wish list. Knudstorp stepped into the CEO role a year later and narrowed the company's mission, increased product innovation, and embraced the existing LEGO community.

This year, Lego Group became the world's second-biggest toy maker as it clicked with the booming Asian markets and built on its popular plastic bricks with video games, theme parks, and "The Lego Movie," due in theaters in February 2014.

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Matt Maloney

Online food delivery competitors GrubHub and Seamless merged in May, with Maloney at the helm. Seamless owned the New York City food delivery market while GrubHub made waves in the Midwest. Combined, the two companies reach 500 cities and work with more than 20,000 restaurants.

This month, GrubHub Seamless announced plans to file for an IPO in 2014. It should help it fend off Yelp, which recently entered the food delivery business.

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Marissa Mayer

REUTERS/Stephen Lam

CEO, Yahoo!

Mayer is reinvigorating Yahoo, which floundered under the direction of the six CEOs prior to her appointment. She has orchestrated 17 acquisitions, including the $1.1 billion purchase of David Karp's blogging service Tumblr; overhauled the photo-sharing site Flickr; and redesigned Yahoo's home page and logo.

Alan Mulally

Under Mulally, Ford was the only American car company that didn't need a bailout during the recession. The company has gone from posting record multibillion-dollar losses in 2006, when he took over as CEO, to five consecutive years of annual profits. Their first, second, and third quarter earnings smashed expectations as they rolled out new, desirable makes and models.

Elon Musk

AP Photo/Jack Plunkett

CEO, Tesla and SpaceX

Musk made headlines with two major announcements this year: first with plans to build a driverless car, and then with proposed designs for the Hyperloop, a new mode of transportation that can get people from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 35 minutes.

Larry Page

In the last 12 months, Google generated nearly $18 billion in profits, and Page has no trouble spending that cash on wildly ambitious and expensive projects: the acquisition of Motorola, Google Glass, Google Fiber, self-driving cars, and a plethora of "moon shots."

Jonah Peretti

Peretti has put BuzzFeed on the map as a legitimate source for hard news and politics and has expanded its long-form content, developing two teams of international news correspondents and investigative journalists.

Karl Johan Persson

Marc Femenia/AP

CEO, H&M

Persson shook up the fashion retail industry when he boldly chose to make a plus-sized model the face of H&M's swimsuit collection. He also picked curvaceous Beyoncé to star in the summer ad campaign. He said that many models the brand has featured in the past were too thin, leading to speculation that other brands should follow his example.

After three years of e-commerce promises, H&M finally debuted its dedicated online store in August. It offers its entire catalog plus additional sizes and styles.

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Ginni Rometty

Now entering her second year as CEO, Rometty is putting a lot of time and energy into IBM's supercomputer Watson, which famously won Jeopardy a few years back. But Watson is more than just a number-cruncher; it absorbs information at amazing speeds, and is starting to diagnose and fight cancer, which could spark some new sales opportunities for IBM. Still, Rometty says that we haven't seen anything yet.

IBM is also entering underserved markets in places like Africa, where competitors have yet to explore, giving IBM a leg-up into the future of finance.

Rometty is the first female CEO of the century-old company, and after making headlines last year for being snubbed by Augusta National Golf Club, the traditionally all-male club decided to invite women for the first time in its history.

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Sheryl Sandberg

Sandberg arrived at Facebook when it was bleeding cash, and with her aggressive leadership, the company turned profitable. This year Facebook's ad revenue soared 66% to $1.8 billion, and mobile ads — Sandberg's pet project — now account for almost half of its ad revenue.

Facebook stock finally rebounded above its IPO price, and Sandberg pounced on the opportunity. She sold $91 million worth of stock. Her remaining stock and vesting options, worth more than $1 billion, make her one of the world's few self-made female billionaires.

More than helping steer Facebook, Sandberg has also been leading the charge to get women to "Lean In" and ask for more in their careers, encouraging them to go after sought-after executive positions. Her book, which came out in May, has been named one of the most influential business books of 2013.

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Josh Sapan

Jamie McCarthy/Getty

CEO, AMC Networks

Sapan is funneling investments into original programming amid the knockout success of "Breaking Bad," "Walking Dead," and "Mad Men." The basic cable network's emphasis on quality over quantity is driving financials over time, and for the first time this year, AMC Networks sold ad inventory for all four of its networks: IFC, AMC, WeTV, and the Sundance Channel.

Kip Tindell

AP/Mark Lennihan

CEO, The Container Store

Despite not turning a profit in the last three years, The Container Store is primed for serious growth. Losses have slowed, and its public offering got off to a monstrous start, with the stock price doubling on opening day. It has reported 14 consecutive quarters of same store sales growth, and is ranked as one of the best places to work.

Tindell is a proponent of so-called "conscious capitalism" — putting the focus on people, not profitability. The Container Store spends more than half of its revenue on employees, which is about 20% higher than the industry average.

John Wren and Maurice Lévy

Omnicom and Publicis announced in July that they would merge, creating the largest ad company in the world. It was a huge and significant move in the industry, with a stock market value of $35.1 billion and more than 130,000 employees.

Together, the companies could now easily collect and sell millions of people's personal information, giving companies access to entirely new sets of consumers, and making a giant mark in the realm of Big Data.

Omnicom and Publicis generated $23 billion combined in revenue last year, which was more than the now-second-biggest ad company in the world, WPP.